Do you have the intense fear of being bored? Let’s explore insights from Leon Garber to see if it’s more than just restlessness.
Understanding the connection between thaasophobia and the desire to be special.
Key points
- Boredom can elicit ruminative thoughts related to one’s negative sense of self.
- Boredom is often related to a deep-seated fear of being ordinary.
- We can learn to feel important without needing to also feel special.
The Fear Of Being Bored…
Thaasophobia is the intense and irrational fear of boredom. It’s often related to symptoms such as impulsivity, compulsivity, perfectionism, restlessness, and ruminations. While boredom can, due to those symptoms, cause some degree of harm, we consider thaasophobia an irrational fear because the harm done is hardly ever life-altering.
Many of our patients are deep-thinkers, therefore they ascribe significance to most aspects of their lives; this is colloquially labeled as main character syndrome. Whereas some view events in a vacuum, these individuals discover ways to relate most of them to some grand narrative, both good and bad.
Read more: 25+ Fun Things To Do When You’re Bored At Home
In the extreme, this can manifest as paranoia, the sense that others are conspiring against you. But, normally, the tendency to weave together disparate pieces into a grand narrative implies a sense of specialness. Boredom, on the other hand, can be inferred to mean that one, in reality, is ordinary. Again, everything is colored with deeper meaning.
Therefore, if one divides up the world between those who are special and the ordinary ones, the above-mentioned interference can spiral into the sense that one is bad, useless, worthless, and a loser. Here, “bored” is symbolic of a poor character assessment of a purportedly poor character.
Being bored, in this case, is akin to feeling ashamed. And shame is at least in part based on black and white thinking. Additionally, being bored can elicit negative memories related to one’s shame. If one is a perfectionist, they may, in turn, elicit standards instilled by significant others. So, now boredom can also imply laziness and wastefulness.
Thaasophobia is often, though not always, ultimately the terror of being ordinary, of living a life that isn’t full of meaning and progress. Patients often ask, “How can I use this to become better?” Or, “What does this say about my life?” What if you can’t, and what if it doesn’t say anything? What if maturity is allowing oneself to experience grief, sorrow, and even rage without running from it, without doing anything about it, or searching for some deeper purpose? What if sometimes things just suck? What if you are ordinary?
In households where ordinariness is shunned, children confuse being special with being important; they learn that to matter to others, they have to matter to everyone, with the sense that parental love is the direct reflection of widespread acclaim and nothing more. To be ordinary is to be unloved.
So, for example, some gifted children may only value their talents if they become famous or at least widely celebrated; they don’t allow themselves to embrace and even appreciate them without some deeper meaning to them. If they’re really talented and not just mediocre, they believe, everyone should see and applaud it.
One can obviously attempt to decouple the fear of the mundane from their understanding of love and approval, but one can also take steps to make concrete changes to help themselves tolerate boredom. We can set aside time to binge-watch television or go for walks. We can sit and try to enjoy a sunny day.
But, mainly, we can ask ourselves how much doing so affects our lives in either direction. (Sometimes, boredom helps us discover ideas and solutions that we wouldn’t have otherwise, merely because we aren’t trying so hard to think.)
Like any other phobia built on catastrophic, predictive thinking, repetition may help extinguish it, and you may learn that boredom doesn’t make your life ordinary because your life was already relatively ordinary to begin with, punctuated with great moments and not so great ones. Even the most special among us can’t escape this reality.
Additionally, we may ask ourselves if widespread acclaim is indeed love. What would a life in which you’re expected to always perform look like? What would it mean if your value to another were solely based on your willingness to provide a service? Meaning is a double-edged sword — while making us feel special, it can also drain us.
The intense need for meaning at times won’t allow us to just be, and it often won’t allow us to feel loved without consistently earning it. One isn’t allowed to become complacent because, if one is, everything could be lost.
We live in a culture of significant external pressures, so making these changes is difficult; one has to determine what they want out of life for themselves. Our patients with more ordinary lives experience more boredom but also more emotional stability, on average.
Read More Here: 7 Surprising Facts About Boredom: Learn The Science Of Ennui
(As an aside: People with Bipolar Disorder or Cyclothymic Disorder often chase the highs of stimulation and pleasure, terrified that boredom is the harbinger of deep depression.) But that may not work for everyone. As I tell my patients, the best that we can do as therapists is, along with their help, present the options available to them with clarity. In the end, they have to decide how to live.
It’s true that a fear of boredom helps drive us to incredible heights, but it can also push us into what feels like inescapable depths.
So, what do you think? Tell us in the comments below!
Written by: Leon Garber LMHC
Originally appeared on Psychology Today
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